Harvard University Press Blog

The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite

Like many Americans, Mark Mizruchi had grown increasingly distressed by the state of our politics. He was unhappy with the gridlock in Washington, the inability to accomplish even the most routine tasks of government, and the intransigence of those who have managed to hold the nation hostage to their extreme views. In trying to understand the problem’s roots, Mizruchi came to see the issue as a lack of national leadership from a group that had previously played a major and constructive role in developing solutions to new problems and keeping American politics mostly centric: the leaders of large American corporations. His goal in The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, new this month, is to explain how this relatively cohesive group emerged, what sustained it, how it declined, and the consequences of its demise. In the book excerpt and video below, he outlines his argument.

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I argue that the leaders of the largest American corporations, to whom I refer as the American corporate elite, once played an important role in addressing, if not resolving, the needs of the larger society. Since the 1970s, the members of this group have largely abandoned their concern with issues beyond those of their individual firms. This abandonment, I suggest, is one of the primary causes of the economic, political, and social disarray that American society has experienced in the twenty-first century. In earlier decades, the United States had a corporate elite that, however imperfect, was willing to see beyond the short-term interests of the firms that its members directed. Today this is no longer the case. The corporate elite that exists today is a disorganized, largely ineffectual group. Paradoxically, I argue, individual American corporations have more political power in the early twenty-first century than at any time since the 1920s. As a group, they are fragmented, however. Unlike their predecessors in earlier decades, they are either unwilling or unable to mount any systematic approach to addressing even the problems of their own community, let alone those of the larger society.

In this book I examine the rise and fall of the American corporate elite, from its pinnacle in the 1945–1973 period, through its period of turmoil and transition in the 1970s and 1980s, to its present state, in which the group is only a shadow of its former self. I argue that the decline of this elite is a significant source of the current crisis of American democracy and a major cause of the predicament in which the twenty-first-century United States finds itself.

In making this claim, I do not want to imply that the corporate elite of the postwar period was uniformly altruistic or public spirited. On the contrary, business leaders during that age were strongly protective of their interests, as they have been in every historical era. Nor am I suggesting that postwar America was a society that we should attempt to emulate in every respect. Social and cultural norms have become far less oppressive since that time. Our society today is far more tolerant and accepting of difference than it was half a century ago. Innovation, especially in the area of information technology, has improved peoples’ lives in many, albeit not all, respects. Consumer products in general are more plentiful and less expensive than in earlier years. There is no returning to the past, nor should this be an ideal to pursue. Yet for all its problems, the postwar United States had a number of qualities that are lacking today: an expanding economy with a high level of upward mobility, declining inequality, a relatively high level of security, a well-functioning political system, and a widespread belief that problems were solvable. And underpinning these forces was a corporate elite that provided a degree of leadership and vision that are not in evidence today.

The World Order Known as Umpire

In American Umpire, historian Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman argues against the familiar notion of the United States as imperial power. In her telling, many of the values and ideals that have become prevalent in the world may have originated with America, but they spread on their own merits, pushing most of the world in the direction of democratic capitalism. The United States did play a unique role in international affairs, Cobbs Hoffman argues, but it did so as a necessary and welcome arbitrator.

Arbitration itself is one of three goals or practices that Cobbs Hoffman sees as having gradually supplanted “the world order known as Empire.” Along with arbitration of disputes are access to opportunity and transparency in government and business. World War II was a watershed event in the transmission of those values, and Cobbs Hoffman notes that in the war’s aftermath the United States stepped forward to play an international part that was then sorely needed.

American Umpire traces world history from the American Revolution to the present, documenting the spread of these global values and the largely benevolent role Cobbs Hoffman sees the U.S. as having played. In that verdict, of course, she’s at odds with any number of critics of America’s international conduct, historian and HUP author Andrew Bacevich perhaps most prominent among them.

One of the interesting things about that disagreement, though, is that each narrative arrives at the same place: whether its leadership has been for better or for worse, welcome or resented, it’s time for the United States to step back from its role as the world’s steward. As Cobbs Hoffman sees it, the United States should greatly reduce its global presence, retire some of its permanent foreign military bases, and make room for other nations to lead. And, as she argued last week in a much noted New York Times piece, doing so would significantly reduce American defense spending, ameliorating the country’s struggling economy and helping to curtail its partisan budget battles.

Part of Cobbs Hoffman’s project, then, is to help the world see ways to carry on in relative peace after the retirement of its American umpire:

How the United States might cease playing umpire is not obvious. The trends toward access, arbitration, and transparency have not yielded an idyllic world. Violent, divisive conflicts remain. Holding the proverbial tiger by the tail, the U.S. government has been loath to let go. Perhaps by examining how the American role developed, this book will encourage other trustworthy nations to do more policing and the United States to do less—as occurred during the Libyan crisis of 2011, when France and Britain took the lead.

The Republican political objection to that strategy of “leading from behind” in Libya, the forceful arguments from the likes of Senator John McCain that the U.S. must intervene in Syria, and the persistent strain of American exceptionalism in the 2012 presidential contest all serve to illustrate the many domestic obstacles in the way of an international American drawdown. For her part, Cobbs Hoffman is dismissive of those who worry that the world would fall to instability without American lead (“It’s patronizing and naïve to think that America is the only truly ‘necessary’ country.”), but the nature of the above-noted objections indicates the challenges to the corrective she’s offering. For it’s likely that the very voices who’ll most welcome her depiction of American benevolence are those least likely to heed her plea for the nation now to stand aside, and those most likely to agree with her calls for a reduced American role are likely least inclined to accept her characterization of its historical valence.

Here’s Cobbs Hoffman describing the book:

 

The Ever-Deeper Ideal of Freedom

Last week we heard from John Burt, author of Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, on the promise of equality in Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. In the piece below, Burt further explores the historical allusions in Obama’s speech, and considers the contingent and expanding ideal of freedom in American history.

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President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address expresses optimism about our country’s seeing its way clear to the next step, rather more optimism than Lincoln felt. To see the difference, consider the way Obama juxtaposed three different allusions to speeches of Lincoln about the lessons of the Civil War:

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by the sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

The first sentence quotes a famous sentence from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. In Obama’s version, the blood drawn by the lash of the master and the blood drawn by the sword of the soldier are the (high) price of a lesson by now thoroughly learned. Lincoln’s version is rather darker. What Lincoln said was:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

In saying this, Lincoln imagined that God may have in mind a course of retribution for the United States so severe that the not-yet-ended Civil War will seem only like the first act; furthermore, should this dire fate befall the Union, Lincoln conceded that it will be a fate the Union has richly deserved.

The phrase about how no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free alludes, of course, to Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of 1858, and it does capture one of the main lessons of the Civil War. But when Lincoln referred to the same subject in the opening sentences of the Gettysburg Address, he saw the question not as whether a republic divided into slave states and free states could survive (he already knew that that question had a negative answer) but whether any republic that chose to test the proposition that all men are created equal could endure. That is a related but distinct problem and the question it raised was in Lincoln’s mind still an open one.

Finally, the phrase about making ourselves anew alludes to the key paragraph of Lincoln’s December 1862 Annual Message:

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Lincoln here did not just imagine the Republic learning a hard-earned lesson. He imagined the Republic reinventing itself completely, freeing itself from illusions about itself to which it has been enthralled, enslaved. Now the Republic has indeed moved forward together since the Civil War, and President Obama certainly knows as well as anyone else does how messy and slow and partial that progress was.

The Promise of Equality

Within days of President Obama’s second inauguration the country and the government had returned from the moment’s pageantry to the social and fiscal challenges we face. His inaugural address, though—with its echoes of hallowed American oratory and its own appeals to posterity—deserves far greater consideration than afforded by the swift turn to business. In the piece below, the first of two, John Burt examines the ways in which the speech links Barack Obama’s sense of American identity to that of Lincoln. Burt’s new book, Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, is a deep engagement with the limits of liberalism and with democracy’s inability to settle moral conflict.

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President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address draws together, in an organic whole, themes from the speeches and acts of the Presidents he most admires. Its vision of an economy of mutual care, in which young and old, rich and poor, sick and well, share an ethos of responsibility for each other and express that responsibility in law and policy, derives, with allowances for changed political circumstances and chastening experiences, from the thinking of Franklin Roosevelt, and Roosevelt’s great successor, Lyndon Johnson. Its vision of America’s place in the world looks back, in ways tempered by harsh experiences, through President Truman’s Marshall Plan to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. But most of all, Obama’s vision of what it is to be an American, his argument that a shared sense of the moral equality of all people is not only an important political value but the ground of American identity itself, the thing that makes Americans a people, ties his sense of what American nationality is to Lincoln’s.

Quotations from Lincoln, whether direct or oblique, recur throughout President Obama’s speech. What most descends from Lincoln is the way Obama reads the promises of the Declaration of Independence:

We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional—what makes us American—is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

What is Lincolnian about this passage is its sense that in America a never completely fulfilled vocation for moral equality stands in the place that shared blood, or shared language, or shared religion stands in other countries. Lincoln argued, in a speech in Chicago in July, 1858, that it is the belief that the promises of the Declaration are “the father of all moral principle in them,” that gives all Americans, wherever their ancestors may be from, a right to claim American nationality “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.” It is a calling for equality, Lincoln maintained, that distinguishes America as America and defines its place in the world. This calling to advance equality is what is exceptional about America, and its success or, all too often, failure, to live up to the demands of that calling, both within its borders and in the world at large, is the measure of its success or failure as a nation. What is more, the course of American history, as Lincoln argued in the Gettysburg Address, is a test, a test in which the rest of the world has a stake, of the viability of equality as a political ideal.

It is by virtue of equality, by virtue of recognizing each other as equal citizens with an equal claim to dignity and public respect, that we share a public world, and it is our participation in that world that shapes our collective identity as a nation and our private identities as citizens. Identity is not atomic; we are what we are because we are already bound up with each other, and equality assures that however else we may be connected with each other, we are also bound up in an ethos of mutual care that shapes our being and gives it a moral vocation. We are what we are as individuals because we share the promise to acknowledge each other as citizens and to take up the obligations toward each other that go with citizenship, with a shared investment in the common life of our republic.

“Ranges are for cattle. Give me a number.”

Much of the work of crafting and enacting public policy is dependent on predictions of the outcomes of the policy being considered. Such outcomes can’t actually be known with certainty—as any responsible researcher understands—yet there’s a drive to arrive at the concrete forecasts often demanded by legislators. A perhaps apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson illustrates the pressure economists can feel to draw strong conclusions. The tale has an economist describing the uncertainty of his forecast to LBJ, and offering a range of values rather than unsupported precision. “Ranges are for cattle,” Johnson is said to have replied. “Give me a number.”

True or not, the anecdote as recounted by Charles F. Manski in Public Policy in an Uncertain World goes a long way towards explaining how the modest findings of cautious researchers become the bold assertions of self-sure politicians. In Manski’s experience, economic consultants understand policy makers to be “either psychologically unwilling or cognitively unable to cope with uncertainty.” And so researchers feel compelled to offer precise predictions that they understand may not be credible.

Following John Kenneth Galbraith’s popularization of the term “conventional wisdom,” Manski offers “conventional certitude” to describe predictions that are generally accepted as true but that may not warrant the certainty they’re afforded. He uses the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as a case study of conventional certitude in action.

The CBO was established in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which includes language usually interpreted as mandating the CBO to provide precise predictions of the budgetary impact of pending legislation. These CBO “scores” are passed on to Congress without accompanying measures of uncertainty, as Manski explains, even though the legislation they assess is often far too complex to allow for the precise forecasting of budgetary implications. And so everyone involved takes for granted what they should surely understand to be fudged, and CBO scores are widely accepted. Even today they’re eagerly awaited by both sides of the aisle in our dysfunctionally contentious Congress.

Nixon's Fake Right

Let’s spend a moment this winter Wednesday on Richard Nixon, who would’ve turned 100 today. A couple of years back we published a book called No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America, in which David Courtwright shows that, despite the common conception, America took no severe turn away from liberalism during the conservative golden age engineered in the wake of Johnson’s Great Society. In the excerpt below, Courtwright details how Nixon won the allegiance of conservative power-brokers without actually delivering the reforms they sought. (Spoiler: Portnoy takes the fall.)

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Nixon saw himself as the leader of a band of tough-minded intellectuals who could achieve power and reverse the national decline by making common cause with the white working class. What hard-hats and beauticians lacked in learning they made up for with an uncorrupted moral sense. The same applied to the Hispanics. “They do have some concept of the manly life, at least,” Nixon told John Ehrlichman, his chief domestic-policy adviser. “They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do.” The nominally Protestant Nixon was all for priests knocking some sense into their charges. He never lost his conviction that religious belief was indispensable for public order. He trusted, and was trusted by, voters of morally conservative temperament. They embraced him as one of their own, despite the peculiarity of his youthful Quakerism and the vagueness of his adult beliefs. Nixon lived what Clare Luce foresaw: temperament supplanting creed in politics. He thought this way himself. When he railed against “the Jews,” Nixon meant left-liberal Jews, not the Orthodox.

Nixon was discreet about where he did his railing. When Billy Graham privately complained that Jews were behind pornography, that their grip on the media had to be broken, Nixon immediately agreed. “Boy, I can’t ever say that,” he admitted. “But I believe it.” Nixon often held his tongue. Everyone knew that public schooling was lousy, he complained to Ehrlichman. The thing was, you couldn’t say so, or you’d provoke the education establishment. “We’ll praise them—pat them on the ass. A demagogue could make a lot of votes on this issue—we’ve got to live with them.”

It was a revealing piece of hypocrisy. Given his right-conservative temperament, Nixon would have preferred a domestic policy aimed at reducing taxes, bureaucracy, union influence, crime, vice, spending, and the supply of money. That he did none of these things consistently, that he presided over an erratically liberal domestic policy, was due to a fateful combination of circumstances. Nixon was the first elected president in 120 years to assume office with the opposition party controlling both houses of Congress. Democrats commanded Capitol Hill, their bureaucratic allies the granite-clad buildings that ran like outworks beneath it. To call Nixon paranoid, Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman observed, was to ignore very real enemies throughout the government, the press, and the establishment. They could block any reactionary policy shift.

Not that domestic legislation was Nixon’s primary concern. He could use his executive authority to keep faith on key issues. He would nominate judges who were conservative on crime. He would cast his attorney general, John Mitchell, as a “helluva crime-fighter,” Dick Tracy with a pipe. He would propose bills halting busing to achieve racial balance, softening the blow with more money for inner-city schools. He would pursue peace with honor in Vietnam, the doves be damned. “North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that,” he told 80 million television viewers on November 3, 1969. The silent-majority address, the most important of his presidency, gave Nixon a bump in the polls and time for a fateful gamble. He thought he could prevail in peace negotiations by building up South Vietnam, intimidating North Vietnam, and getting the divided Soviets and Chinese to back off their client. As in poker and football, two obsessions that shaped Nixon’s worldview, what counted was the gutsy call at the right time. Foreign-policy decisions made or broke presidencies. Domestic mistakes were fixable. Congress could tinker with the details. The Kremlin was less forgiving.

What Was the South Seceding To?

Forgive us, please, for continuing to dwell on Spielberg’s Lincoln. It’s not often that we have a rich trove of books on the very subject captivating the nation’s conversation. Wait, strike that, it’s pretty often, actually. It’s kind of our thing.

Anywho.

The film has a scene in which Lincoln and Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens have retreated from the grand reception of the president’s second inauguration down to a messy White House kitchen. Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln, driven to engineer the passage of the 13th Amendment, is trying to convince Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones, to temper his usually-forceful demands for racial equality, so as not to scare off the moderate votes required for the bill’s adoption. The scene, packed with quick Kushner dialogue, witty and wise, is one of the film’s great depictions of politics as art of the possible.

In the course of their volley Lincoln expresses his admiration for Stevens’s “zeal,” but explains why he’s had to act with greater restraint than the congressman had wished:

If I’d listened to you, I’d’ve declared every slave free the minute the first shell struck Fort Sumter; then the border states would’ve gone over to the confederacy, the war would’ve been lost and the Union along with it, and instead of abolishing slavery, as we hope to do in two weeks, we’d be watching helpless as infants as it spread from the American South into South America.

That reference to South America is one of the very few moments in which Spielberg gestures towards the global context of the American Civil War, and it’s all the more striking for how matter-of-factly it’s dropped into conversation. The standard popular and historical gaze back at the Civil War—embodied pretty accurately by the film, save the above—sees the coming of the conflict as territorially bounded by regions that were only delineated by the war itself. The narrative, in other words, reads the parties created by the war as those that started it.

As Walter Johnson argues in River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, a much-anticipated book whose publication is but a couple of months away, we need to ask not just what “the South” was seceding from, but what it was seceding to:

It takes no great insight (only a taste for heresy) to say that the story of “the coming of the Civil War” has been framed according to a set of anachronistic spatial frames and teleological narratives. It is resolutely nationalist in its spatial framing, foregrounding conflict over slavery within the boundaries of today’s United States to the exclusion of almost every other definition of the conflict over slavery. Because of the territorial condition of the regions under debate and the character of federal recordkeeping, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act produced tremendous archives that American historians have used to terrific effect. Yet for many in the Mississippi Valley (and for the president of the United States, who in 1852 devoted the first third of his State of the Union address to the topic), the most important issue in the early 1850s was Cuba, an issue that was related to but certainly not reducible to the question of territory gained through the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850. Similarly, for many pro-slavery Southerners, especially in the Mississippi Valley, the issues of Nicaragua and the Atlantic slave trade were more important than the question of Kansas (dismissed by many as a fight over a place where no real slaveholder would ever want to live anyway) and more important than what was happening in Congress, from which they, in any case, expected very little. The standard narrative, that is to say, projects a definition of spaces which resulted from the Civil War—no Cuba, no Nicaragua, no Atlantic slave trade—backward onto its narrative of the description of the conflict over slavery before the war.

Much of this work has been done through the category of “the South,” which serves in its dominant usage as a spatial euphemism for what is in fact a conceptual anachronism: those states which eventually became part of the Confederacy. But what the “Southern position” was on any given issue... was subject to fierce debate at pro-slavery commercial conventions of the late 1850s, which are generally seen as hotbeds of secessionism. About the only things upon which those conventions could agree was that there was something called “the South” that was worth fighting for and that the election of a Republican president in 1860 would be grounds for secession. The ultimate grounds for secession represented a sort of lowest common denominator, a platform defined by what everyone involved agreed “the South” could not be.

We recently had a chance to speak with Johnson about pro-slavery imperialism, the political economy of slaveholders, and the inherently-expansionist logic of cotton monocropping:

 

Incidentally, there’s another striking moment in Lincoln, in which the president and his Secretary of State are directly pleading for Kentucky congressman George Yeaman’s support for the amendment. “I saw a barge once, Mr. Yeaman,” Lincoln says, “filled with colored men in chains, heading down the Mississippi to the New Orleans slave markets. It sickened me, ‘n more than that, it brought a shadow down, a pall around my eyes.”

Those New Orleans slave markets are the subject of Johnson’s earlier work, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. The book—recently the focus of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Effete Liberal Book Club”—lays bare the chilling day-to-day workings of the commodification of human beings. It’s a deeply effecting work, and a must-read for anyone unsettled by the tendency to reduce the era to faceless statistics and the congressional jockeying of white men. 

These Things Called "Ideas"

This fall, with its American presidential election leading right into the fiscal cliff/curb/cudgel, has given us all ample time to consider the ethical implications of free market capitalism. It’s a system to which inequality is inherent, and the debate we’ve been having is ostensibly over the extent to which government should help to ameliorate the harm our economy visits on many. Which, of course, means we’ve just been stuck in a prolonged moment of inertial uncertainty on a pendulum that’s been swinging since at least the early 20th century.

Throughout these months we’ve also been treated to a rare appearance on the public stage of these things called “ideas.” The word’s usage this fall, so often in rhetorical connection to that Republican idea-man Paul Ryan, has mostly been so emptied of meaning as to depress anyone who’s ever actually had one. “Idea,” in its employment this political cycle, has been code for the stripping down of recycled policy proposals to their “big,” “brave,” or “bold” kernel.

Nevertheless, their brief center stage has provided fine occasion to think on the role of ideas in politics and public opinion, as has the timely publication of Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, a history of the evolution of conservative economic thinkers in the decades after a global economic crisis forced a reconsideration of their worldview. See? Timely.

Burgin’s focus is the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international association founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek and later helmed by Milton Friedman. Burgin shows that, in contrast to the popular telling, an awful lot changed in the transition from Hayek to Friedman, both in the particulars of conservative economic opinion and in the assumed role of the economist in its dissemination:

Friedman shared Hayek’s understanding of the importance of ideas and the long horizons of ideological change, but they parted ways on the question of rhetoric. Friedman’s public utterances, unlike those of his predecessor, are marked by their near-total instantiation of [British constitutional lawyer Albert Venn Dicey’s] warning against qualifications in the presentation of an economic philosophy. While Hayek remained aloof from politics and confident in the influence of his ideas unaided by his public persona, Friedman embraced the reductive language of the American public sphere as one more lever in the provocation of ideological change. He recognized the absence of limitations in his advocacy of laissez-faire as a primary source of its polemical strength.

Earlier this year we spoke with Burgin about that evolution, and Friedman’s turn towards the public:

 

When you consider the multiplying effect of each generation consciously stripping nuance from the public presentation of their ideas, and the ensuing game of reducti-phone, well, today’s political sphere becomes far more intelligible. Nevertheless, as Burgin explains, the history of the Mont Pèlerin Society should be read as “an extended plea for the relevance of the history of ideas to the history of politics,” and should also help us to understand that ideas themselves are “sites of contestation” subject to reformulation, not merely the static tools for which they’re often taken.

Presidential Politics in the Workplace

As was widely reported in the weeks before the American presidential election, executives and owners of several companies warned their employees that an Obama victory—and pursuant changes to tax and regulatory structures—would have devastating results for their businesses. At least implicit in these briefings was the notion that each worker’s job was on the line, and that a self-interested employee would be wise to cast their ballot for Mitt Romney.

Sometimes that message was blatantly clear. In one case, as reported by UP w/ Chris Hayes, the President and CEO of ASG Software Solutions, Arthur Allen, warned his 1,000 employees that a second Obama term would lead the company to be sold and downsized:

We have been stuck in an extremely sick global economy, but as we should all know by now, the global economy largely depends on the US economy. This sick global economy has been negatively influencing ASG since December 2008. No one could have ever have dreamed that the US economy would still be sick 4 years later, but it is. We have a chance, as individuals, to help turn the sick US economy into a healthy economy, and positively influence the global economy as well. This chance comes on November 6th, when we elect a new President and administration. The US and the world need to elect individuals who have business experience. Neither the world nor the US can stand to elect politicians any longer. In my view, and in the view of most business leaders, if you give politicians 100 questions, they will give you back 100 wrong answers simply because they have no basis for making those decisions. Would you hire a person with no experience to do brain surgery? Of course not, but that's what the US voters did in 2009. Why does the world keep hiring politicians to run our global economies when they have no experience? It just makes no sense, and yet the world keeps doing it over and over again. Let's take the lead on November 6th and show the world how it should and can be done.

[…]

I am asking you to give us one more chance to stay independent by voting in a new President and administration on November 6th. Even then, we still might not be able to remain independent, but it will at least give us a chance. If we don’t, that chance goes away.

After Obama’s decisive reelection, the Wall Street Journal asks whether these companies will actually follow through on their layoff threats, but the companies are mostly keeping mum. The article quotes an employment lawyer who notes that the Citizens United case “opened the door much wider to employers attempting to influence their employees’ political attitudes.” The law here isn’t “cut and dry,” says the lawyer, but clearly these are efforts at voter intimidation, which is prohibited in some states.

Now, it occurs to us that there are also any number of businesses that would have suffered under a Romney administration, and, for that matter, university presses are likely among them. University presses, after all, serve the higher education market; most UPs get large portions of their income from their publications being used in college and university courses. It follows, then, that more students would equal greater financial health for university presses. So, applying the bottom-line thinking of a threatening CEO, it’s not hard to compare the higher education proposals of Obama and Romney and conclude that a Romney victory would have hurt university presses. As far as we’re aware, though, UP brass seem to have refrained from threatening their employees with layoffs under a Romney administration. May their restraint be a model for the Arthur Allens of the world.

Market-Based Disaster Justice

The devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy has shone floodlights on the workings of disaster relief—which many see as one of government’s core functions—as well as on Mitt Romney’s previously-stated desire to defund FEMA and privatize its functions. With less than a week to go before the American presidential election, it’s important to imagine what market-based disaster protection and relief would look like. Below, in a brief excerpt from Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World, Rob Verchick explains why such an approach would never appropriately address the inequalities that disasters always exacerbate.

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According to the market-based approach, hazard protection should be allocated the same way other goods and services are allocated in the marketplace. Protection should follow explicit or implicit market signals. The current resurgence in America of the market-based approach might accurately be said to have begun when President Ronald Reagan proclaimed in his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”

Reagan’s approach to market solutions is grounded in an intellectual movement called neoliberalism, a revived form of traditional liberalism that champions free markets and individual liberty in an economy gone global. As geographer David Harvey puts it, “[n]eoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.” Some may believe that neoliberalism as a guiding principle is waning in the Obama administration. This is not entirely so. While it is true that President Obama and, perhaps, the public have embraced a more optimistic view of government and its role in American life, current economic forces will ensure that American law and international law continue to follow a market approach to solving big problems. Thus the goal, from a disaster justice perspective, is not to reverse the market approach (as it can’t be done) but to make space within the neoliberal framework for a vocabulary of justice. In this area, the Obama administration may prove a helpful ally.

From the neoliberal model, three relevant corollaries follow. First, neoliberal policy seeks the efficient allocation of resources. “Efficient,” here means optimizing aggregate social welfare in a context of limited political and material resources. “Efficient” does not always mean “fair,” and for this reason free-market ideology is sometimes described as “amoral.” Second, free markets are much better at allocating resources than are governments or other organized institutions. This is what Reagan meant by “Government is the problem.” Third, neoliberalism promotes an ethic—some would say “virtue”—of self-sufficiency and the stoic acceptance of unfortunate consequences. Individuals are expected to assume the risk of participating in the market, and to adapt quickly to changing landscapes. “Instances of inequality and glaring social injustice,” in this view, “are morally acceptable, at least to the degree in which they could be seen as the result of freely made decisions.” Indeed, as neoliberal philosopher Robert Nozick has argued, efforts to redistribute wealth in order to rehabilitate economic losers creates its own injustice by treating affluent individuals as a “means” to enhance the “ends” of those who are less affluent.